Lessons
Lesson Info
Class Introduction
Hello, everyone. My name is Dan Milner. I am creative evangelist for blurb books. And today we're gonna talk about making using Blur book write software to make a trade book. In essence, what we're gonna do is learn a specific workflow software, which is book right to make a specific product, which is a trade book. But before we get started on that, I think there's something that we have to talk about that I think is really important, that oftentimes gets overlooked in the book making process. And that is that Bookmaking is supposed to be fun. I've done this job for blurb for many years now. I've traveled all over the world. I've met with every conceivable kind of bookmaker that you could possibly meet with. I've met with really established professionals, and I've met with people who've never opened a book making software. And I've noticed that we have a tendency of putting pressure on ourselves to make the perfect publication the first time we attempt it. And I think that's really unf...
air. And I think what happens is it has a tendency of pulling some of the fun out of the process. So my advice to you before we begin is forget everything you know. Relax, be patient and have fun in the process if we look at the creative industries in general, so let's take screenwriting and literature. Photography design illustration. Etcetera ART If you look at the greatest work that comes from these disciplines, it's impossible for people to make their best work the first time through. So imagine an author sitting down and trying to create the great American novel on the first draft. It just never happens. What happens is they revise and revise and revise, sometimes often 89 10 revisions. It's OK, relax, enjoy the process and have fun. I can guarantee you that if you commit to this and you finally create something creative book and you hit print and it uploads and you order that book, and roughly 10 days later it shows up on your doorstep. When you open that package and see your own print in work, you are going to be hooked on the process. I have done this hundreds of times, literally in the past 10 years for blurb, and I can assure you that it never gets old even after if I tear open the packaging and 30 seconds later I see something I could have done better. I don't stress about it. I just say, Look, I'm gonna live and learn. I'm gonna take that information and I'm gonna move on to the next book that I make. The key here is relaxing, having fun, enjoying the process, and starting This is really the key of today's program is that you're gonna be able to start your book by the time we get to the end of this program. So let's talk a little bit more about the actual program itself. So we're gonna cover a lot of different things. Even before we get to the actual blurb software, we're gonna talk a little bit about color management. We're going to talk a little bit about organizing your images or your content, and we're also gonna talk about defining what it is that you actually want to make and what the benefits are of doing that by the time we get to the software, you're gonna understand where the software is on the blurb site, how to download it, how to install it, and you're also gonna have an understanding of all the basic nuts and bolts that buttons and how the software itself actually works. So we've got ah lot to cover. You do not have to be an expert toe watch this program. In fact, you could be someone who has never seen or opened the program before. You will be totally fine. So one of the reasons I love book write software is that you can make so many different things inside the software. You can make photo books, magazines, trade books and e books all in the same program. Now, today we're gonna focus on trade. But I want to give you a little background on some of the other four mounts because I think they're very important. Photo books are your classic illustrated books, so imagine soft cover hardcover archival paper. Very classic. Things like You don't have to be a photographer to make one, but a lot of photographers used them. They are the classic photo book magazines are a little different. Magazines are soft cover, they have magazine weight, paper, and a magazine is different from a book because it's it's treated differently by the people who consume them or read them. Magazines typically signified that there is another issue in the process coming. They're great for doing things like cereal publishing or installment publishing, etcetera. Today we're gonna talk about trade, trade books and trade. Books are often times overlooked on the blurb site. They're a little different. Their global standardized sizes five by 86 by nine and eight by 10 on text wait paper so you don't have the same photographic style paper, but they're really interesting strategic little tools that are less expensive than photo books and size differently. Different materials. A really interesting thing to utilize and think about. And finally, you can make e books and book. Right and e books are a little bit still a mystery to people in the book making World. The way that I look A E Books is I think, that there are a wonderful companion to a printed piece or a printed book, so I typically always make an e book with whatever I'm doing. But I tend to make the e book different, a different experience than what the print book is. That way. They work in tandem really well, and they're not competing with one another, so we're going to cover all of those different things in today's program. But before we go even further, I just want to back up one little bit a little bit more, one step backwards and look at books in a greater context. Was thinking about this the other day. Humans have been writing their story or trying to tell their story since we lived in caves and we were writing on cave walls, so I don't know exactly how long ago that was. I'm not exactly a history buff to that level. All I know is it was a long time ago when the book came into existence in the printing press. It was it was a natural progression in that lineage of humans being able to tell their story, put it in print and then share it with others. So when you sit through this program and you learn all these different steps and tools, in essence, when you start making your own printed books, you are now a part of that exact same lineage. You are helping tell your story or the story of others. So let's take trade books, for example, that we're going to study today. What could you do with a trade book, virtually anything if you think about it. So the trade book that you make after today's program could be it could be a family heirloom. It could be a scientific experiment. It could be some sort of freeform artistic book. Or it could be a book. Let's say that you have a large online following and you want to make something that you can sell to your followers. That's an application for it Behind the scenes book anything or if you're really creative, you could create something that we have never seen before. Be a hero, and then we would all probably be watching you and following you, so that's an option as well. So before we go any further, let's just remember to relax, slow down, enjoy the process. And now we can start moving on to Phase two, which is talking a little bit about color, organizing your files and defining what it is you want to make
Ratings and Reviews
a Creativelive Student
This course is about how to use Blurb, not about how to make a book. What I mean is, it is helpful for people who have made books and/or photo albums before and want to learn how to use Blurb. It was also helpful to me as someone who has already made a few Blurb books already but wanted to learn to use it better. I definitely learned a couple things, and given that I watched it during a free broadcast, it was totally worth the price of admission (in my case, 60 minutes of my time). In my case, I learned that Blurb has downloadable icc profiles as well as the ability to make low-res proof pdfs. As someone who learned Blurb by downloading the program and clicking away (from time to time searching some online forums) these are extremely useful things I wouldn't have known about any other way. What the course does not do, however, is teach you how to make a book. It names all the steps (color management, edit, sequence ...) and how important they are, but don't expect anything but a shout out to help you remember to do it well. As examples: The section on color management is basically "Remember to calibrate your screen and soft proof using an icc profile." If you don't know what either of those mean, this course won't teach you what it is, much less how to do it. Secondly: he shows you how to add a background color to your pages, but nothing about when to do that, why to do that, and how to do it well. A last example: Daniel's most important advice is to "edit tight" -- SUPER important but for me, really difficult. Unfortunately, Daniel doesn't go into how to go about doing so. He doesn't even give tips about what to think about when culling down your own photos. I'd have paid a lot of money to watch him cull photo's for two or three books, listening to his thought process while he chooses which photos to include and which to cry over and then leave out. To do all these things would have required a day-long course rather than an hour-long course, but for me, that course would have been far more helpful. It probably have been useful for people using other programs and/or vendors as well. What the course does do, of course, is explain the Blurb BookWright software. You COULD teach yourself by pressing buttons and searching on-line forums like I did. Or, you could watch this course, save yourself a lot of time, and get information you didn't even think to ask about. Since the course goes through all the basic buttons, the course could be useful to an absolute beginner photo album maker, which is what Daniel clearly wants to achieve. He spends a lot of time trying to encourage people who have never made a book before. In my opinion, an absolute beginner book / photo album maker could learn a lot more by starting out with a far more "let me do a lot of this for you" type of program. You know the type I mean? The program that comes with (perhaps cheesy) themes, clip-art, frames, etc.? That way, see the possibilities and develop a sense of what you like before you use something like BookWright, where any and all objects that end up on the page have been created and placed by the person making the book. Doing so will give you far more ideas when you start creating entire spreads ex nihilo on your own. Then, if you want to switch to Blurb, you can watch this course (before or after you've made a couple books just using trial and error). That background will increase the chances that (if you're lacking a degree in publishing) you'll be able to piece together what Daniel's talking about when he uses the specific publishing industry vocabulary.
user 89d27e
Thank you. We are just starting to write our own recipe book and this popped up on Creative Live. It was very helpful, thank you for it :)
Lianne Kruger
Dan gave some good information on * how to layout a book * some good helps with the main page of bllurb. * some entering photos on the screen and layout I do not agree that this is a trade book. He did not go through how to add text with a photo. A trade book to me would be instructions along with photos. He did not show how to do that. The course is supposed to be a trade book